izzy

inside my chest there is a small dog chasing its own tail
frantically, a whirlwind of furrowed brow and gnashing teeth

*

sarah

As the first snow of the season fluttered in the dawn
He found that the world had lost all its colour
The pastel riots of the past, the velvet and satin and frothy chiffon
The daftly bubbling syrupy cocktails
The floral piped icing so sweet your teeth sang
The rich draped folds of a woman’s gown as she panted, pink and scented –
All gone. All the laughter and chatter and tinkling crystal all lost to the wind
And now nothing but the snow and the concrete and the vicious barbed wire
And the stark white men in their thick black suits
Standing stony in their dead, matte leather jackets
Clutching their dead, matte metal pistols
All focused intently on his gently mumbling heart
Plodding faithfully away beneath his drab, thinning shirt.
He eyed them all calmly, and found that he ached not with fear
But with a sort of terrible disappointment
In them, in everything, in these days grown old
And as the bullets churned in their chambers, he let out a sigh
And thought, there is nothing in the world quite like the sadness
Of a consummate gentleman in an ungentlemanly age

*

izzy

obsessing over the movements of the sun
the way the light breaks over rumpled sheets
or glares into drooping mid-afternoon eyes

this heaving celestial body doing the rounds
sparking fires in the skull, the gut, especially the ribcage
says a lot about optimism and absence

*

sarah

As the wine and the night and the 5 am sheets fold me up
The woodfire smoke is stinging my eyes and hair
Floating like a buzzing cloud over my too-high forehead
Disaster systems go –
Kiss you –
Sleep.

*

izzy

sunsets on beaches flooded with millions of couples holding hands
running hand in hand, tripping on flowing pastel kaftans and sarongs
maybe some horses as props
maybe some people on horses just for good measure

noon in glass cities bursting with thousands of tin-drum buskers
banging heads of luscious hair, bodies rolling with the beat
maybe some caps filled with silver
maybe some crowds pushing closer to complete the picture

sunrise in warehouses crowded with hundreds of ravers pointing skyward
dancing like it’s still 1999, swaying like the tallest poppies ever seen
maybe some smoke machines
maybe some petrol generators to set the scene

midnight in a forest empty of everyone but these two humans
sitting in trees, reaching across the gaps in the branches
maybe some frogs singing softly
maybe some moonlight to fill in the silhouettes

*

sarah

Quick! Find a book and press me between the pages
Slam the cover shut and stand on me for a week
Let my fluids leak out between the paragraphs
Fold me out flattened and coffin me in glass
I’ll hang on the wall for half of forever
I’ll never be this happy again

*

izzy

‘Can I have some?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Please can I have some?’
‘No sorry, we’re…’
‘Give me some of that.’
‘No, we’re just…’
‘Just a little bit. Just give me a little bit.’
‘No-‘
‘Just the tiniest bit, see -‘
‘It’s a celebration.’
‘Just put it in here, and I’ll walk away.’
‘No, we’re celebrating – we haven’t seen each other in a long time.’
‘I just want-‘
‘SHH. They’re celebrating. It’s a celebration. Walk away.’
‘But I -‘
‘Leave it.’

…

‘Excuse me, hello – can I -‘
‘Leave them alone, they’re celebrating.’

*

sarah

To the boy I dated when I was sixteen:
I’m sorry that I wasn’t a very good girlfriend.
I’m sorry that I dumped you over email when I was in Germany.
I’m sorry that I only remember three times we hung out –
The first, the night you passed me my Ventolin,
Said ‘You two, huh?’ and I felt a little mouse do a tumble roll in my stomach.
The second, my birthday, sit-spooning on a trampoline
Your red hair and my bright pink polo shirt making a festival of bad fashion
You picking at the beads on the legs of my jeans
Me loving the destruction, the threads poking through
The last, the night you gave me my first kiss
Spit-soaked and tumble-drying, standing upside down in front of me
The carpet under my fingers and me wondering what all this was about
Me teasing you, saying you wanted to have sex with someone –
A celebrity? A mutual friend? Time has stolen the details
And you looking soft at me sideways, saying clear and serious
‘No, I want to have sex with you.’
And the terror that slid down into my stomach, hot and cold and heavy
As my insides closed off, like a chase scene in an adventure film
The doors slamming down and me skating beneath them
Losing my shoes in the hurry to leave

*

izzy

There’s a small gang of trees standing naked outside the airstrip perimeter. The other trees stand staring from behind their lush greenery, foliage twitching, twigs snapping and crackling. They’re putting the forest to shame, holding their shivering grey bodies so close to the fence for everyone to see. *** I find myself hoping they’ll shimmy or do whatever the tree version of twerking is up against the fence, shaking it for the incoming flights, flaunting it because why the hell not? These trees could flaunt their nakedness aggressively at all the jet-lagged eyes staring puffy and vacant out of little porthole windows. They’re still trees no matter what they look like – they’re just as much tree as their prudent leaf-sheathed cousins – and trees can pretty much do whatever they goddamn please. It won’t stop people cutting them down, so they may as well strut past this fence and say, ‘fuck you, I’m beautiful!’ to all the other judgemental trees and then chest-bump and co-ordinate a dance like a 90s girl band or start a rap collective or whatever. I don’t know, whatever it is that’s in the hearts of this gang of naked trees next to the airstrip perimeter, whatever they want to be or do I have no doubt that they could make it happen. That they’d do it really well, no matter what the other green-eyed trees say.

*

sarah

As the metal hinged open
And the ice hissed in the air
He sighed for the first time
In six thousand decades
And felt his moustache stiff with frost
His brain thawed into life
Ran some basic diagnostics
Played a little pre-recorded message
You died. We froze you. We love you.
And he stood for a moment
Patting down his shiny silver suit
And arranged his face into a stern sort of nobility
The sort of expression befitting a cryonaut
He squared his shoulders and held his breath
Flying cars and robot dogs flitting around his brain
And stepped out into the sun
Stood blinking like a new god
And surveyed the future that man had wrought
He raked the sky for shimmering buildings
And found none, just drifting clouds
He peered about for roads of light and whirring hovercraft
And saw nothing but dirt and straggly trees
He sought the gaze of the crowds of the future
And found not a soul, not one
Until a hesitantly cleared throat at his side
Drew his eyes to a pale-eyed old man with tufted white hair
Who smiled apologetically, shuffled his feet
And whispered ‘We never did work it out, you know
They left me long enough to let you out
Let you walk on the earth one more time
And once we’re done, we’re going
There’s nothing here for us’
And while neither said it aloud
British reticence still being what it was
In the waning hours of the world
They both knew that ‘gone’ didn’t mean to Spain for the summer
And with nothing more to say
They stood together, side by side
And drank in the dust and the wind and the sun
And the hum of their hearts
And the taste of the end

*

izzy

packaged baby carrots, pre-packaged, peeled and tail-ended
they look like weird mutated orange baby fingers
I keep expecting them to be soft between my teeth

*

sarah

My head’s up by the window cleaners
Scraping the sky
And my collarbones are strutting the street like a New Orleans jazz band
I stuff a pigeon through my teeth
And feel it press down through my eighteen-storey neck
To land with a thump between the gridlocked cars

*

izzy

thousands of eyes thawing into still lakes
little glinting pools reflecting twin skies

blades of grass punching through crumbling dirt
reaching for the sun or trying to escape their roots

the wind dabbed perfume in all 5 places it wants to be kissed
suddenly, the park benches make sense

*

sarah

The flood left a carpet of stinking black mud through the corridors of the house where she first fell in love
And the sofa with the scorch mark from a forbidden cigarette wriggled in the daylight, bursting with blind white worms
The fridge was a kaleidoscope of vicious, fur-toothed mould and simpering fat slime
Which pooled on the shelf where she had laid her inaugural cheesecake to set before tea
The nursery crawled with chittering glossy insects, arguing shrilly over the sheets in the baby bassinette
And she suddenly knew the truth of all things: that the price for a life is always a death

*

izzy

I’m gonna eat cereal whenever I goddamn want
breakfast for dinner is brinner and it’s better this way
hey why not mix it up and have dinner for breakfast too?

I want to tell politicians that their faces annoy me
because I can’t articulate all of the real things I want to say
about how they’re fucking our systems from the inside out

I am the tiny caterpillar gnawing through underwater fibre optic cables
from Sydney to LA, I’m so fancy I’m gonna eat all your internet
I’m eating all your internet one byte at a time, watch me devour this

the world is enormous and Atlas has a sore back
his contract only allows collective bargaining and no chiropractic cover
the world is enormous and yet the whole thing is on a pinhead

*

sarah

Mercury slunk through the holes in her heart, oozing silver-black sweetness into each crack
She felt her chest stiffen with concrete-hard certainty, and smiled at the bulletproof fist in her ribs

*

izzy

giant, mobile neon signs follow us around
flashing the words ‘life choices’ from every angle

sitting in the information flow, waiting for things to change
we will eat breakfast for dinner whenever we goddamn please

the neon signs are inescapable, and there’s an earnestness
to the way in which the world tries to swallow us whole

but I just can’t stop thinking about the impossibility
of collisions and cellular miracles that have led to us being here, now

*

sarah

As I walked into the night, I found that I had, without noticing, stolen a teaspoon, tucked into my hand. I wondered whether it was a sign that I should go back and ask if you were okay. I’m pretty sure you weren’t. But instead, I scaled the wall by the old people’s home, and left the spoon on the bluestone, stared for a moment at the nurse slumped inside, felt guilt course like blood through me. And I left.

*

izzy

Claws skitter on slick pavement, darting back from the swing of headlights growling past again. Brushtail between legs, ears pricked and fur bristling. Peeking out from behind a parked tire, waiting for an opening – SLAM. There is a crack and for a moment the air is heaving open, the road is splitting in two, the whole scene falling to pieces. Strings of letters, mostly consonants, trailing around the wreckage. Flecks of profanity falling into the spray of glass, dancing over dented metal. Two pieces of furious meat step out of their vehicles, faces red in the whip of rage. Movement slicing the dying dusk, everything spinning and lurching but the road is finally still. Hear the thuck of flesh on flesh as fist and head connect. Brown fox bolts across the road and disappears into the park.

*

sarah

I saw that man backpedalling as he sailed into the air
And the wind never ballooned him back to the earth
I took a drumstick to a picked clean ribcage
And no glockenspiel melody sounded out
I’ve kissed and I’ve kissed and no fireworks have started
I’ve danced across the world and no crowds have joined in
What else have the cartoons lied to us about?

*